Pitfall! is a video game developed by David Crane for the Atari Video Computer System and released in 1982 by Activision. The player controls Pitfall Harry, who has a time limit of 20 minutes to seek treasure in a jungle. The game world is populated by enemies and hazards that variously cause the player to lose lives or points.
Gonzalo Frasca is a game designer and academic researcher focusing on serious and political videogames. His blog, Ludology.org, was cited by NBC News as a popular designation for academic researchers studying video games. For many years, Frasca also co-published Watercoolergames with Ian Bogost, a blog about serious games.
Super Columbine Massacre RPG! is a role-playing video game created by Danny Ledonne and released in April 2005. The game recreates the 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Columbine, Colorado. Players assume the roles of gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and act out the massacre, with flashbacks relating parts of Harris and Klebold's past experiences. The game begins on the day of the shootings and follows Harris and Klebold after their suicides to fictional adventures in perdition.
Pac-Man is a 1982 maze video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. under official license by Namco, and an adaptation of the 1980 hit arcade game of the same name. The player controls the title character, who attempts to consume all of the wafers in a maze while avoiding four ghosts that pursue him. Eating flashing wafers at the corners of the screen causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue and flee, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points. Once eaten, a ghost is reduced to a pair of eyes, which return to the center of the maze to be restored.
Darfur is Dying is a flash-based browser game about the war in Darfur, western Sudan. The game won the Darfur Digital Activist Contest sponsored by mtvU. Released in April 2006, more than 800,000 people had played by September that year. It is classified as a serious game, specifically a newsgame.
McDonald's Video Game is a Flash game published and developed by the Italy-based group Molleindustria in 2006. It is described as an "anti-advergame", meaning a satire of various companies and its business practices. It has also been classified as a newsgame or an editorial game by Ian Bogost.
Shark Jaws is a single-player arcade video game by Atari, Inc. under the name of Horror Games, originally released in 1975. An unlicensed tie-in to the movie Jaws, and believed to be the first commercially released movie tie-in, it was created to be a game about sharks eating people. Atari head Nolan Bushnell originally tried to license the Jaws name, but was unable to secure a license from Universal Pictures. Deciding to go ahead with the game anyway, it was retitled Shark JAWS, with the word Shark in tiny print and JAWS in large all caps print to create greater prominence. Bushnell created a second hidden subsidiary corporation, Horror Games—the previous being Kee Games—to help isolate Atari from a possible lawsuit. According to Bushnell, the game was successful enough to sell approximately two thousand units.
Ian Bogost is an American academic and video game designer, most known for the game Cow Clicker. He holds a joint professorship at Washington University as director and professor of the Film and Media Studies program in Arts & Sciences and the McKelvey School of Engineering. He previously held a joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Chair in Media Studies.
Superman is a video game programmed by John Dunn for the Atari Video Computer System and released in 1979 by Atari, Inc. The player controls Superman, whose quest is to explore an open-ended environment to find three pieces of a bridge that was destroyed by Lex Luthor, capture Luthor and his criminal gang, and return to the Daily Planet building. The game world is populated by antagonists such as a helicopter that re-arranges the bridge pieces and roving kryptonite satellites that cause Superman to revert into Clark Kent.
The first hobbyist-developed game for the Atari 2600 video game console was written in 1995, and more than 100 have been released since then. The majority of games are unlicensed clones of games for other platforms, and there are some also original games and ROM hacks. With only 128 bytes of RAM, no frame buffer, and the code and visuals closely intertwined, the 2600 is a difficult machine to program. and many games were written for the technical challenge. Emulators, programming tools, and documentation are available.
Cow Clicker is an incremental social network game on Facebook developed by video game researcher Ian Bogost. The game serves as a deconstructive satire of social games. The goal of the game is to earn "clicks" by clicking on a sprite of a cow every six hours. The addition of friends' cows to the player's pasture allows the user to also receive "clicks" whenever the player's cow is clicked. A premium currency known as "Mooney" allows the user to purchase different cow designs and skip the six-hour interval between clicks.
Endgame: Syria is a trading card based newsgame developed by GameTheNews.net, a project looking to turn news into games. It launched on the 12 December 2012 and claimed to be the first ever attempt to cover an ongoing conflict in the form of a video game. It attracted a range of responses from the positive to critical. The game places the player in the role of coordinating the rebel side of the Syrian Civil War, where they have to decide the political and military choices faced in resolving the conflict. An iOS version was planned, but cancelled due to conflicts with Apple's developer rules concerning its subject matter.
NarcoGuerra, Spanish for "DrugWar", is a strategy newsgame developed by GameTheNews.net. It was released in June 2013 for Android, PC, Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.
1000 Days of Syria is an interactive fiction newsgame centered on the first 1,000 days of the Syrian civil war. In the game, the player chooses the role of one of three characters, each of which have three different endings dependent on the choices the player makes throughout the game. It was created in 2014 by Mitch Swenson following his experiences in the conflict to inform more people of it.
Incremental games, also known as clicker games, clicking games or tap games, are video games whose gameplay consists of the player doing simple actions such as clicking on the screen repeatedly. This "grinding" earns the player in-game currency which can be used to increase the rate of currency acquisition. In some games, even the clicking becomes unnecessary at some point, as the game plays itself, including in the player's absence, hence the moniker idle game.
Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. The theory argues that games can make strong claims about how the world works—not simply through words or visuals but through the processes they embody and models they construct. The term was first coined by Ian Bogost in his 2007 book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.
Mitch Swenson is an American author, war reporter, screenwriter, and game designer.
The Marriage is an experimental art game created by Rod Humble and released for Microsoft Windows in March 2007. Humble set out to explore the forms of artistic expression unique to video games, leading him to express his feelings associated with marriage by relying primarily on game mechanics rather than on traditional storytelling, audio, or video elements. The game uses only simple colored shapes that the player interacts with using a mouse. The player's actions cause pink and blue squares to increase or decrease in both size and opacity, representing the balance of personal needs in a relationship.
Raid Gaza! is a short real-time strategy Flash game by Marcus Richert which satirizes the Israel–Palestine conflict from a pro-Palestinian perspective. The game was uploaded to Newgrounds on December 30, 2009, three days into Israel's Operation Cast Lead, and was also released for Android phones through Google Play. It has been referred to as a newsgame and an "editorial game" by Ian Bogost, and as a "journalistic game" by Piotr Kubinski.
Oil God is a 2006 newsgame created by Persuasive Games dealing with the relationship between the gas prices at the pump and the way the oil industry works. It has been likened to a simpler version of the strategy game Black & White. The lead designer was Ian Bogost. The reception was mediocre; James Ransom-Wiley of Engadget called it "a crude experience, pumped with superficial cynicism [that] fails to deliver "news" about the real world oil biz."
